The evangelists of global atheism are at it again, says The Record’s Guy Crouchback.
British professor of atheism Richard Dawkins is reported to be setting up summer camps where children will be taught athiesm, ths reviving a practice in Britain which fell into disuse with the fall of communist governments in Eastern Europe.
The London Times reports that children at the camps will sing along to John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Instead of singing Kumbiya and other campfire favourites, they will sit around the embers belting out “Imagine there’s no heaven . . . and no religion too.”
The peculiar compulsion of some athiests to beclown themselves shows itself strongly here. John Lennon’s “Imagine” must, for a start, rank as one of the most sheerly dishonest songs ever written.
While railing against possessions he maintained an entire New York high-rise apartment simply to house his collection of furs in the manner in which they accustomed.
This champion of “peace” supported the IRA. And why, for that matter, should a self-styled rationalist and devotee of science like Professor Dawkins hold up an as exemplar a semi-educated child-man whose body had served as a test-tube for an entire pharmacopeia of drugs and whose credo, to the very limited extent that is existed in any coherent form, was not only anti-religious but also anti-rational and anti-intellectual?
I thought at first that if Professor Dawkins wants songs for his budding atheists to sing around camp-fires, he might adapt some of the poems of the two great anti-Christian poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – Algernon Swinburne and AE Housman. They were admittedly, not particularly pleasant as human beings, nor marked by emotional maturity, nor indeed was their thought terribly consistent, but at least they could write some beautiful, musical lines. Can one imagine arranging a bit of Housman for campfire singing?
Now hollow fires burn out to black,
And lights were guttering low,
Now lift your shoulders,
square your pack
And leave your friends and go.
Oh, never fear lad, naught’s to dread,
Look not to left or right.
In all the endless road you tread,
There’s nothing but the night
But there could be trouble if the homeward-faring little atheist, looking not to left or right, finds himself in a ditch. Parents might complain. Or perhaps a chorus of:
Who made the world, I cannot tell,
‘Tis made, and here I am in Hell.
My hand, although the knuckles bleed,
I never soiled with such a deed
Still, this is not quite ideologically correct. If Hell is admitted to exist, some of our budding atheists might speculate, does this not imply that Heaven might exist too? And if we do not know who made the world, this at least leaves open the possibility that someone made it. Should we then turn to Swinburne?
From too much love of living, from hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving whatever gods may be,
That no life lives for ever, that dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river winds somewhere safe to sea.
No, on second thoughts that won’t do either. “Whatever gods may be” suggests, after all, that there may be gods. Heresy creeps in again.
It is also true that there is a sort of zestiness missing here – “Hail, Queen of Heaven,” or even “Onward, Christian soldiers,” seem to lend themselves to campfire song more readily, but need that matter? “Be of good cheer!” is, after all, a Christian not an atheist injunction. How about:
For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.
And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:
Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years ?
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day;
But love grows bitter with treason, and laurel outlives not May …
Oh dear me, no! “Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean” can really be read as an admission of defeat. It’s rather a thankless task selecting lyrics for atheist campfire songs.